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With bacteria becoming progressively more resistant to existing drugs and no new type of antibiotic hitting the market for almost 30 years, experts have warned that medical treatment could soon be dragged back to the 19th century.

Britain’s Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies has outlined an apocalyptic scenario in just 20 years, in which routine procedures become deadly because relatively minor infections can’t be quelled.

Against this backdrop, the discovery of a super-antibiotic capable of wiping out infections that could have been fatal has been hailed as “a very promising development.”

The new drug, which was found in soil, was discovered after American, British and German scientists studied bacteria from a grassy field in Maine.